“If your main income stream were to stop for whatever reason, where would you be with your savings?”

I am Carole McDougall and I am a property investor and trainer and I am a professional network marketer in the health and wellness industry. 

I have been married to Scott for more than 35 years and have two grown up children and we live in St Andrews in Scotland but originally from Glasgow. 

So 10 years ago I was a paid employee working for a chartered surveyor and my husband worked off shore with an oil and gas company. We were comfortably well off and had a great life. 

My husband at the time was our main income earner, and with me being made redundant from a job that I’d been in for many many years, it really made me think about where we would be with our savings, and I thought, what savings, because everything that we earned, we spent either doing up our house or going on holidays or buying cars, and basically enjoying ourselves. So we didn’t have anything to fall back on. 

My husband and I bought our first home in 1985. I was 21 years old. And we bought a fabulous house, which we lived in up until 2 years ago. I remember feeling so excited being so young and owning my own house. The interest rates on our mortgage was 16% which in this day and age in the UK is just ridiculously high. 

Almost 20 years later I decided to buy our first investment property. Over the years I witnessed how much property had increased and the interest rates had dropped so I thought it was a great idea. 

I have a wealth of knowledge around property investment.  I have bought, sold, done up, rented and now Airbnb.